Box Office Poison

Originating as a minicomic, Box Office Poison began with Kyle Baker as inspiration. While not possessing Baker’s insight and quite his facility for witty dialogue, Alex Robinson certainly has the art down in the early issues and rapidly embraces his own style thereafter. Robinson is producing what amounts to an intelligent, contemporary, soap opera, which sits comfortably alongside highly lauded equivalents such as Strangers In Paradise. There’s a broad, mainly likeable cast, of which Robinson is too fond to really put them through the grinder, meaning traumas are largely of a transitory nature. This makes for a largely upbeat comic. Short chapters are punctuated by pages of questions put to the cast (“If you could change one thing about yourself…” etc), and Robinson is even able to fire off some barbs about comics with a plot concerning a crusty old comic artist ripped off decades previously. The special, numbered zero, reprints Robinson’s first minicomics and displays him as an accomplished and confident creator from the off. ~FP